The Quiet Rise of Austin Abrams: Why Hollywood's Most Interesting Young Actor Refuses to Become a Star

There's a moment in Euphoria season two where Nate Jacobs, played by Jacob Elordi, is unraveling in his customary explosive fashion. The camera holds on him just long enough to notice someone in the background: Ethan, the soft-spoken ex-boyfriend, watching with a mixture of pity and exhaustion that says more than any line of dialogue. That someone is Austin Abrams, and in that single wordless reaction, he accomplishes what the show's more bombastic performances rarely achieve—he makes you feel the weight of a person simply existing in a room too small for his decency.
Hollywood has spent the last decade trying to figure out what to do with actors like Abrams. He's handsome in an unremarkable way, the kind of face that blends into a high school hallway or a suburban cul-de-sac. He doesn't command the screen so much as accumulate presence, scene by scene, until you realize he's become the most interesting thing in a given frame. At 28, with credits spanning HBO, Netflix, and independent film, Abrams has constructed a career that feels almost defiantly unglamorous—deliberately choosing roles that shrink rather than expand his persona.
This wasn't inevitable. Abrams could have followed the path laid by The Walking Dead, where he appeared briefly in 2015 as a character named Ron Anderson. The show was at its cultural peak; a savvier actor might have parlayed that exposure into leading-man auditions, superhero casting calls, the standard ascent. Instead, Abrams disappeared into smaller work—a supporting turn in Paper Towns (2015), a memorable but brief appearance in Brad's Status (2017) opposite Ben Stiller, a quiet run of films that barely registered at the box office.
The conventional wisdom holds that young actors must establish their brand early: the heartthrob, the comedian, the intense dramatic lead. Abrams seems almost allergic to this logic. His breakthrough to wider audiences came through Euphoria, yes, but as a character explicitly designed to be overshadowed—Ethan's whole narrative function, initially, was to represent the normalcy that the show's more extreme characters couldn't sustain. Even there, Abrams found something specific: the particular hurt of a good person discovering his own capacity for cruelty, his season-two arc culminating in a revenge fantasy that revealed more about his character's buried rage than a hundred of Nate's tantrums.
What distinguishes Abrams's choices is his apparent comfort with being the second or third most interesting person in any given project. In Dash & Lily (2020), Netflix's holiday romantic comedy that arrived during the pandemic's first winter, he played the titular Dash with a melancholy that undercut the genre's mandatory cheerfulness. The show itself was minor, but Abrams's performance suggested dimensions the writing didn't always support—a young man using romantic pursuit to delay confronting actual grief.
This pattern repeated in Do Revenge (2022), Netflix's teen thriller that attempted to update the '90s high school movie for Gen Z audiences. Abrams played Max, the golden boy with secrets, a role that in lesser hands would have been pure villainy. Instead, he found something almost sympathetic in Max's desperate maintenance of his own image, the performance hinting at how exhausting it must be to be that publicly perfect. The film's best scene might be Max's unraveling at a party, Abrams letting the character's composure crack in ways that feel earned rather than melodramatic.
The industry has noticed, if fitfully. Abrams landed his first true leading role in 2023's The Starling Girl, though even there, he played against the film's actual star, Eliza Scanlen. More recently, he's appeared in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, returning to the franchise that gave him his start, now with the clout to shape his character rather than simply inhabit a predetermined arc. These aren't the moves of someone chasing stardom. They're the moves of someone building something slower and potentially more durable.
There's a type of actor that American film has always struggled to accommodate: the character lead, the performer compelling enough to anchor a film but unconventional enough to resist full commodification. Think of John Cusack in the '80s, or more recently, Jesse Plemons or Paul Dano. These careers require patience, a willingness to let audiences catch up to what you're doing rather than meeting them where they already are. Abrams appears to understand this, or at least to have no interest in the alternative.
His contemporaries have largely taken different routes. Timothée Chalamet became a phenomenon through sheer intensity of presence. Lucas Hedges built critical respect through consecutive awards-season films. Tom Holland became Spider-Man. Abrams, by contrast, seems content to be the guy from that thing you liked, the actor whose name you might not immediately recall but whose face triggers recognition and, increasingly, pleasant association.
This has costs, obviously. Abrams will likely never have the cultural footprint of those peers, the magazine covers and brand ambassadorships, the shorthand recognition that opens doors to the most prestigious directors. What he gains, though, is the freedom to keep surprising people, to maintain the slow-building goodwill that comes from never disappointing expectations you never encouraged in the first place.
In an era of unprecedented actor visibility—social media presences, behind-the-scenes content, the constant demand for authenticity that somehow always looks the same—Abrams's relative opacity feels almost radical. He gives interviews sparingly, posts irregularly, seems to have little interest in the performance of personhood that increasingly precedes the actual work. The result is that when he does appear on screen, there's nothing to compete with the character, no accumulated parasocial relationship for the audience to project onto him.
Whether this strategy can sustain over decades remains to be seen. Hollywood's economics favor the known quantity, the actor whose name on a poster reliably translates to ticket sales or streaming clicks. Abrams hasn't yet proven he can carry a major film, and at 28, the window for conventional leading-man status narrows annually. But there's another possibility: that the industry itself is changing in ways that might finally accommodate someone like him, that the fragmentation of attention across platforms creates space for actors who excel at being interesting rather than famous.
The late Roger Ebert once wrote that the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If that's true, then actors like Austin Abrams are its most efficient operators—performers who understand that empathy is earned gradually, through the accumulation of small truths rather than grand gestures. He's not the future of Hollywood, exactly. He's something rarer: a reminder that Hollywood can still make room for patience, for the slow build, for the actor who trusts that being good might eventually matter more than being known.
Whether the industry deserves that trust is another question entirely. For now, Abrams keeps working, keeps choosing, keeps building a body of work that looks more coherent with each addition. The stardom may never come. The respect, if there's any justice, already should be here.